Majakovskij and Eisenstein Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Majakovskij and Eisenstein Celebrate the Tenth AnniversaryAuthor(s): Elizabeth HendersonSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), pp. 153-162Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/306134 .

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MAJAKOVSKIJ AND EISENSTEIN CELEBRATE THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY

Elizabeth Henderson, Boston University

A picture, so the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. In comparing two closely kindred works of 1927, Vladimir Majakovskij's poem It's Good! and Sergej Eisenstein's film October (Oktjabr', or Ten Days that Shook the World), it might be discovered that it ain't necessarily so. In the hands of a master craftsman like Majakovskij, the art of poetry has powers that film, the technological enfant terrible of the world of art, is at pains to equal.

It's Good! and October emerge from a common aesthetic and a shared experience. In the mid-1920s Majakovskij and Eisenstein counted them- selves among the adherents of the Left Front of the Arts whose journals Lef and New Lef Majakovskij edited. The Left Front insistence on authentic materials - whether the real voices of the revolutionary street or the actual buildings, objects, and participants in an historic event - facts and documents valued over fantasy and imagination, guided the artistic choices of both artists. Both consciously strove to fulfill the Left Front demand that artists confront political issues, openly declaring their allegiance to the revolutionary cause and dedicating their work to the construction of a new Socialist society.' Common to It's Good! and October is the dual style characteristic of so much of Soviet political art of the 1920s, reaching back to Majakovskij's 1917-1918 play Mystery Bouffe. Symbolizing the faith that though the class struggle may be long and hard its outcome is assured, the bad guys are handled in a buffo manner, burlesqued or satirized, while the good guys are presented in heroic style, more naturalistic but with less good humor.

Majakovskij's poem and Eisenstein's film share roots in the first great reenactment of the revolution in Petrograd, the 1920 pageant The Storming of the Winter Palace in which over six thousand people took part, many of them actual participants in the original storming. A hundred thousand citizens of Petrograd stood in the cold October rain to bear witness to the triumphant spectacle.2 The tenth anniversary pieces, It's Good! and October, polish the crude devices of the pageant while preserving its energy and el1an. Like the committee that whipped together The Storming, Majakovskij and Eisenstein create a montage of "essential moments," selected episodes in

SEEJ, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1978) 153



154 Slavic and East European Journal

contrasting styles. Their materials are the minimally falsified documents of the revolution: the people and their voices in songs and speeches, the streets, buildings and weapons of the revolution, the historical facts as vic- torious partisans would remember them.

With the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution just behind us, it seems appropriate to return to an earlier celebration when memories of the original event were still alive in people's minds. The tenth anniversary, like Lenin's death three years previously, was an occasion for artists to commemorate. For the first time in history, a Socialist government, overcoming seemingly insuperable obstacles, had survived for an entire decade. Though far from the total transformation Left Front visionaries had hoped for, the Soviet government had, in ten years, begun to make enormous changes in the political, economic, and cultural life of the country. The tenth anniversary also coincided with the climax in the struggle for power which followed Lenin's death. Trockij, who had been chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917 and a leader of the insurrection, delivered his last speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in October 1927, to be expelled a month later and exiled to the east. Joseph Stalin was henceforth even more firmly in control. The "revolution of the spirit,"3 the cultural revolution Majakovskij had proclaimed in 1918, was given one last chance in the crash program for industrialization and collectivization of the first Five Year Plan, and then postponed - indefinitely. It was thus with a sense of urgency that Majakovskij, Eisenstein, and other Left Front artists took up the anniversary theme.

Majakovskij composed It's Good! An October Poem between December 1926 and August 1927. He planned on doing theater and film adaptations, but only the theater version materialized. The Leningrad Malyj Opera Theater produced sections two through eight of the poem, which highlight the events of 1917, as a tenth anniversary show. In the film world Ma- jakovskij had heavy competition from fellow Left Front members. Four anniversary films were produced, three involving Lef contributors. Ester Sub made The Great Road, a compilation film using old archive footage, clipp- ings from earlier documentaries, and newsreels. Aleksandr Rodienko designed the sets for Boris Barnet's Moscow in October, a reenactment of actual events filmed to look as much as possible like a documentary. Eisenstein's October uses a similar technique, but Eisenstein is much more daring in his use of filmic metaphors. The best scenes of October are far above the level of the more plodding Moscow in October, which scurries through Moscow streets avoiding electric wires and store windows. The fourth of the anniversary films, The End of St. Petersburg, was the work of Vsevolod Pudovkin. Though never associated with the Left Front, his film, while it has a more or less conventional plot and was performed by Moscow Art Theater actors, shows the formal influence of Dziga Vertov and



Majakovskij and Eisenstein 155

Eisenstein in its most effective passages of agitational montage, such as the stock exchange sequence. Vertov did not make an official anniversary film, but his production of that year, A Sixth Part of the World, celebrates the achievements present and future of the Soviet Union with an enthusiasm more appropriate, perhaps, for an anniversary piece than for its intended purpose as an advertisement for Gostorg, the government trading agency.

Though the government commissioned both It's Good! and October, creating works for this occasion was not a perfunctory filling of a factual order for either Majakovskij or Eisenstein.4 The revolution had a special meaning for them as artists and men. Majakovskij makes his purpose in writing It's Good! explicit in the poem - he wished to communicate what the revolution meant to him politically and in very personal terms. By recreating both its famous events and its more humdrum everyday hardships and joys, he hoped to keep alive and transmit to others the spirit and energy needed to carry revolution farther:

I wish that after being with

this book a spell Out from apartments' petty world Shall march again

on shoulders of machine gun shells,

Glinting like a bayonet

with my verse. That from this book

through joyous eyes, from this happy witness - into tired

muscles shall arise

the strength for construction

and rebelliousness.5

The initial sketch for Eisenstein's film was close to the final version of Majakovskij's poem. Working from a scenario of over a hundred pages for a vast "film epic" by A. Efimov, Eisenstein wrote his own scenario in Oc- tober 1926. The first three parts coincide roughly with the final film. Parts four through seven continue the historical review through the Brest- Litovsk Peace, the building of the Red Cavalry, the years of intervention, typhus, and other hardships, the Perekop victory, and a culminating appeal to begin Socialist Construction.6 Essentially this is the outline of It's Good!, but as Majakovskij worked on the poem, what was originally a documentary acquired lyric dimensions as well. Unlike his previous long poem Vladimir Il'iE Lenin with its three long narrative sections broken only




by flashes of satire and repeated oaths to the proletariat and the Communist Party, It's Good! takes the form of nineteen short episodes or "poem details" - a form Majakovskij first explored in his scenario How Are You?7 Each episode of It's Good! could stand alone as a separate poem. Ma- jakovskij, however, combined and arranged them with particular care for their cumulative emotional impact.

After announcing the purpose of this poem in the first episode, the poem chronicles the historical events of 1917 in a series of six anecdotes, alternating satire and heroic pathos. The poet appears in the last of these scenes which recounts his late night encounter with Alexander Blok in the midst of the revolution, and then records the sounds of the revolutionary streets and countryside. Episodes eight and nine introduce themes of Socialist patriotism and bourgeois incomprehension. The central section of the poem, the tenth episode, presents Soviet Russia surrounded by White armies and foreign interventionists. Life within the circle, Majakovskij's own experiences, and events from the Civil War occupy the next five episodes which contrast lyric and documentary sequences. Then the circle is broken; the sixteenth episode narrates the end of the war. The final sections look forward in time to what the country will become and backward to the revolution's honored dead. Elegy gives way to ode as the poem concludes on a Whitmanesque note: Majakovskij affirming his sense of sharing in all that his country is and will be.

Because of the pressures of a tight shooting schedule - a mere eight months from March 1927, when the anniversary committee approved the final scenario, until November - Eisenstein was forced to reduce his initial plan and limit the film to October in Petrograd. Even thus shortened, Eisenstein was not able to complete the film in time for the anniversary and only a few fragments were screened at the celebration in the Bolshoi Theater on 6 November. There are reports that the film came under political scrutiny and that shots of Trockij had to be cut. However, very little is known about what went on between November 1927 and the final release of the film in March 1928, when Eisenstein wrote: "October is ready. It is ready and not ready. A year of completely overwhelming work. By the end this year wore us out."8 With much fanfare a few years ago Grigorij Aleksandrov, Eisenstein's collaborator, released a full version of the film - but all he added were a few shots.

As released in 1928, October chronicles the revolution from the toppling of the Tsar in February 1917 through Lenin mounting the podium to address the Congress of Soviets in October. It is the public spectacle of the revolution: revolutionary troops marching; the rituals of diplomacy; the trenches of the war; bread lines; the anti-Provisional Government demonstrations of July; the clash of Kerenskij and Kornilov; and the final military victory of the Petrograd workers under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.




There is no room in this scheme, as there is in Majakovskij's poem, for Eisenstein the young engineer turned artist, who, when he should have been constructing bridges for the Red Army, sketched hundreds of designs for theater productions. Eisenstein's personal vision informs his film in a different way and appears with greatest power where he is freest from canonical events, as in the opening of the bridges. In this sequence Eisenstein makes us see the metal of the bridges, feel their ponderous weight contrasted with the shimmering waters of the Neva as only he could do. Our attention is riveted to the drama of the bridges by Eisenstein's choice of images - the dangling horse, the long silky hair of the young woman who tried to flee to safety across the bridge. The real objects become a metaphor for the revolutionary struggle. Similarly in the dance sequence: Bolshevik agitators have gone out to talk to Kornilov's Savage Detachment. Eisenstein builds suspense by allowing the camera to linger over the exotic armaments of the Caucasian warriors. The dance dispels the tension in an ecstatic image of international unity.

The American filmmaker Stan Brakhage has pointed out that Eisenstein returned again and again to these ecstatic moments of heightened rhythm and violent motion. He did this not, as many have suggested, because they were realistic, because, for example, alternating the face of a gunner and the muzzle of a machine-gun in two-frame shots conveyed the real feeling of a gun at work, but because this was the quality of Eisenstein's own vision.9

By contrast, the almost total absence of hyperbole and metaphor in It's Good! is unusual in a major poem by Majakovskij. There is only one in- stance of the associative metaphoric flow that characterizes A Cloud in Trousers or About This in It's Good! and it is reserved for a particularly emotional moment. The initial pages of section fifteen chronicle the hardships of the Civil War in the matter-of-fact tones of a newscast: the economy is at a standstill, a locomotive has run out of wood, work brigades mobilize to chop the fuel needed, five people freeze to death, rumors spread of the approach of Denikin's army, snatches of the hopeful voices of his middle class sympathizers resound, the Party responds with the slogan, "Proletarians, to horse!" This chain of briefly summarized events is in- terrupted by a shift in the level of emotion and in poetic diction:

Today the day

entered in a plunge its shriek

rending the hush, wheezing away

through its shot up lungs

it fell and expired

in blood. (301.)




The passage realizes the metaphoric cliche "bloody day." Then the blood itself comes alive: it drips ("kaplami / kapala"), the sounds evoking the name of Lenin's would-be assassin, Kaplan, whose name in turn suggests the form of the revolution's enemies, "fourlegged . . . jackals," ("cetverolapye ... .akalii"). The sound-play carries through the Bolsheviks' response. The Cheka terror raises the "paw of class" ("lapa klassa") against the "white-fanged monster." This is one of the few instances in the poem of the sort of personified hyperbole that predominates in the class warfare of 150,000,000 and Vladimir Il'ib Lenin. Instead of metaphors and imaginative fictions, It's Good! "drinks from the river named 'Fact,' " to quote the poem's prologue (235).

The central event of the poem, of course, is the October Revolution and its most dramatic moment - the storming of the Winter Palace. Majakovskij's interpretation of this event is markedly different from that in Vladimir Il'ib Lenin. In commemorating the leader's death, despite all his ef- forts to avoid doing so Majakovskij made Lenin into the epitome of the historical process, the one ruling intelligence commanding the actions of the working masses. It's Good! redresses this imbalance. The first harbinger of October sounds in the angry voices of peasant and worker soldiers who are fed up with the Provisional Government and give their backing to the Bolsheviks. Section two quotes their long lists of empty promises. The alternation of long lines and very short ones heightens their militant irony:

They lied: "the people -

freedom, forward,

epoch, dawns.. ."

for nought. Where

is the land, and where

the law, to give

us land by spring? -

Nothing! What

do they give for February,

for work, for not going AWOL? -

Fuck all. (238.)

Lenin's leadership is mediated through the consciousness of a worker- Bolshevik. In rough colloquial language the worker recounts the preparations for insurrection. His speech is sub-literary, sprinkled with ungram-




matical forms,"iz voennoj bjury," ("from the military bureau"), military jargon, "samokataina" ("motorized units"), and colloquialisms, "t6ka- t6ka" ("just now"), "ne delat' zavenden'ja pitejnovo" ("don't get drunk"). At the same time Majakovskij conveys a heroic eloquence to the determined and business-like words of his worker: "Either I will take the telephone [exchange] or I'll give up my proletarian soul." The worker quotes Lenin setting the date for the insurrection: "Tomorrow, he says, is early for a ris- ing. / But the day after tomorrow is late. / That means, tomorrow." (250- 52.) Eisenstein quotes the very same lines as titles in October. Both Eisenstein and Majakovskij used John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World as their source.

For the storming of the Winter Palace Majakovskij tried to achieve the effect of a newsreel. Several other sections of It's Good! - the scenes from the intervention and the end of the Civil War - reveal the same techniques. The storming, however, is the longest and most complete episode in the poem. In writing about film montage, Eisenstein once remarked of Majakovskij's stepladder lines that he divided the lines not along their grammatical borders, but along the borders of cinematic "frames."'10 In the storming episode, Majakovskij cuts both the lines and the narrative flow into a series of dynamic shots linked primarily by chronological association.

The action begins at an already high pitch. Majakovskij cuts back and forth from the revolutionary forces gathering in an "iron ring" around the Winter Palace to the demoralized defenders of the Provisional Government, establishing suspense with the conventional device of the adventure film, much as Eisenstein does in October. The entire episode in the poem could be analyzed into a shot list for a documentary-style film like October. Here is an example from the opening scene:

Long shot: the Neva River with ships Carrying Red Sailors from Kronstadt.

Close up: their bayonets. Long shot: a car speeding along a road, its hood

bouncing with each bump. Close up: Kerenskij in the car, an expression of

panic on his face., And juxtaposed to his pitiful flight, a title, recalling his fierce anti-Bolshevik declaration: "By the horns, / the bull! / Those rebellious slaves! .. ."

Long shot: a few stars in the dark sky. Medium shot: the Keksgol 'mcy, revolutionary troops,

marching up Mil'onnaja Street. Close up: Lenin in disguise at Smolnyj, pacing

rapidly, deep in thought.

This series of short, dynamic flashes of action continues throughout the episode.




Like It's Good!, October shows Lenin in Smolnyj, the Winter Palace with the ranks of its defenders thinning as the siege closes more tightly around it and the ministers sitting amidst its ornaments. The cannon shots from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, the Cruiser Aurora hovering on the river, the huge mass of people charging across Palace Square and into the Palace, the contrast between their simplicity and its grandeur, the revolutionary soldiers putting an end to looting, and Antonov announcing that the Provisional Government is deposed - all of these moments are common to film and poem. Juxtaposing the two, however, reveals how much more rhythmically compelling Majakovskij's poem is than Eisenstein's film. With a few well-chosen words, Majakovskij suggests a vast array of elements from the most varied categories. He is more laconic than Eisenstein by the means of silent film. The poet has greater success in har- nessing the historical artifacts to the formal demands of his medium. The elaborate mechanics of the storming on which Eisenstein lavishes much precious footage remarkably are not memorable. Soldiers march, hands grab guns, trucks roll through the night, speakers mount and leave the podium at endless meetings. Eisenstein is too slavishly devoted to the meticulous details of these preparations. The rhythm sags. The Palace with its incredible wealth of bric-a-brac proves to be stronger visually than its mass of invaders.

Only towards the very end of this sequence is Eisenstein able to generate rhythmic momentum. He does an extraordinary trick with film time using the clock which ticks off the minutes till the deadline of the Bolshevik ultimatum. The clock first shows 11:30, then 11:40, 11:50, 11:55, 11:58, and 12:00. In actual time the first interval lasts three minutes, the second - five, the third - two, the fourth, three minutes on the film clock, stretches out to four minutes, and the final two minutes last another three. Real time compresses and expands according to the needs of the film.

This motif of clocks is more fully developed in the scenario than in the final film (77-86). As in Trockij's History of the Russian Revolution, Eisenstein's scenario plays on the wonderful irony that the iron precision of the Military Revolutionary Committee caused the insurrection to come twenty-four hours late, on the morning of 25 October instead of 24 October as planned. I would suggest that it was this, and not shots of Trockij, that led to the re-editing of the film.

It is important to keep in mind that October marked a turning point in Eisenstein's approach to film art. Its best passages - the raising of the bridges, the sequence of the gods, the dancing - were experimental. Eisenstein was seeking a new level of expressiveness in film which would allow him to convey intellectual messages in highly emotional images. He dreamed of filming Marx's Das Kapital using devices from James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique." It's Good!, by contrast, was the last




epic poem Majakovskij was to write, the culmination of ten years of poetic practice is responding to the latest events in the history of his country and its revolution.

In conclusion, it is necessary to contrast the underlying political message embodied in the structures of these two works, so close in other respects. Both stormings end in Smolnyj with the Bolshevik-dominated Congress of Soviets. Eisenstein's climax shows Lenin mounting the podium accompanied by the cheers of the Congress. Majakovskij, in harmony with the poem's emphasis on the common soldiers, concludes with the entire Congress triumphantly singing "The International."

Framing the events of the storming, Majakovskij evokes the cold wind of October, an oblique reference to a line from Blok's poem about the revolution, The Twelve - "Wind, wind, over all God's earth."'2 In Majakovskij's poem the wind and the trams that never stop running lend an everyday note to the historic events of the night. In contrast to his usual hyperbole, Majakovskij effectively understates the significance of the great upheaval. In the opening lines the winds blow "under Capitalism": they continue, "as always," in the concluding lines, only "under Socialism" (254, 263). The balance in the poem between the everyday and the heroic speaks powerfully to its audience of the significance of every single member in the struggle to build the commune - a vision of revolution far more faithful to the mass ethos of the 1920 Storming of the Winter Palace than Eisenstein's more orthodox conclusion.

NOTES

1 See the Lef program in the form of three manifestoes in LEF: Zurnal levogo fronta iskusstv, 1 (March 1923), 3-11. Two of the manifestoes are available with other theoretical articles in English translation: Screen, 12 (1971-72), 25-58.

2 For descriptions of the pageant by two members of the committee which directed it see N. Petrov, "Massovye revoljucionnye prazdnestva," Teatr, 1957, No. 8, 89-96 and K. N. Deriavin, "Vzjatie Zimnego dvorca v 1920 g.," in Sovetskij teatr: dokumenty i materialy (L.: Iskusstvo, 1968), 274-75.

3 Majakovskij called for "the revolution of the spirit" in his "Open Letter to the Workers," Gazeta Futuristov, No. 1 (15 March 1918).

4 The distinction between a factual order and a "social command" was crucial for Ma- jakovskij. He fulfilled orders because he wanted to, sensing without being told what the "proletarian state" needed.

5 Vladimir Majakovskij, "Xorolo!" Polnoe sobranie socinenij (13 vols.; M.: GIXL 1958), VIII, 236. I have revised the English version of It's Good! by Herbert Marshall in Mayakovsky (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 364-72. Marshall translated only the first and last sections of the poem, which has never been translated in its entirety.

6 These events occur in another version in "Acts" (5-9). See Sergej Ejzenitejn, Izbrannye proizvedenija (6 vols.; M.: Iskusstvo, 1971), 67-86, 425-45.




7 See my translation of "How Are You?" in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 7, Fall 1973, 161-76. See also my analysis of the work in the same issue, "Shackled by Film: The Cinema in the Career of Vladimir Majakovskij" 297-320.

8 Sergej Ejzenitejn, "Nag Oktjabr '," Kino, 13 March 1928. The process of making the film is described by Ju. Krakovskij, "Kak sozdavalsja fil'm Oktjabr '," in Iz istorii kino (M.: Iskusstvo, 1965), VI, 40-64.

9 Hollis Frampton, "Stan and Jane Brakhage Talking," Artforum, 11 (1973), 72-73. 10 Sergej Ejzengtejn, "Montai 1938," Izbrannye stat'i (M.: Iskusstvo, 1956), 281. 11 Sergei Eisenstein, "Notes for a Film of Capital," tr. Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and

Annette Michelson, October, 2 (1976), 3-26. 12 Aleksandr Blok, "The Twelve," Sobranie socinenij (6 vols.; M.: Pravda, 1971) III, 233.



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Majakovskij and Eisenstein Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary